


Soulmate Timer AU for Aromantics

by jemtessa



Series: Aro Friendly Soulmate AUs [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Aromantic, Gen, Happy Ending, Self-Discovery, Soulmate-Identifying Timers, Soulmates, aromantic positivity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:14:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23635879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jemtessa/pseuds/jemtessa
Summary: Everyone has a timer on their wrist that counts down to the exact moment you will meet your soulmate. For longer than you can remember and what you've been told by your parents your timer has always been set at 00:00:00.
Series: Aro Friendly Soulmate AUs [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/729300
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	Soulmate Timer AU for Aromantics

**Author's Note:**

> written in second person
> 
> trigger warnings:  
> \- arophobia / internalised arophobia

It haunts you like a stain. Bold, black **00:00:00** plastered across the inside of your left wrist. This was your normal since the day you were born but you always knew it wasn’t _the_ normal. “The Normal” was that your timer would count down to the time you would meet your soulmate. But your parents didn’t let you know it wasn’t normal, you found that out by yourself the moment school friends started asking questions. The conversations always turned out the same.  
“What does your timer say?” one of your classmates said. Even though you know what it says you look anyway, you always do. Maybe because you knew that it shouldn’t say 00:00:00 already. Maybe you had heard the rumours about the countdown. Maybe because deep down you hope it’ll say something different one day…. It never does.  
“What does yours say?” you respond trying to take the pressure off of you. Do you be honest? Or do you lie? You didn’t know what the “normal” timestamp would be either.  
“Come on I asked first,” they say, batting their eyes and pleading with you. So you sigh and give in.  
“Zero hours, zero minutes, and zero seconds,” you whisper, hoping they didn’t hear. They give you a blank expression before letting out a laugh. It wasn’t a hurtful laugh, eventually you’d get used to hearing it but that didn’t mean it didn’t make your heart wince every time.  
“You’re joking, right?” your classmate says, their voice shaking a little. There were two things they could be thinking at this moment. One: that you had already met your soulmate. Two: that there was something wrong with you. You knew it had to be the latter, at this point in time you were too young to have found your soulmate. You were only twelve years old.  
“No,” you say firmly before showing them your wrist.  
“So who is it,” now this surprised you, and you feel the nerves eating at your stomach for the second time. Once again you contemplate telling a lie but this one could easily be found out. They could easily go and ask the person if it was true by looking at their timer. And so once again you tell the truth.  
“I dunno,” you shrug, making your classmate even more confused. “It’s been like that since I was born.”  
They look at you and that’s when you see it, the pity, the disgust, the confusion. They really don’t know what to say, part of them doesn’t want to believe you but the other partly knows this explanation makes more sense than you already having met your soulmate. But that doesn’t stop them from distancing from you. 

The first time you had this conversation it you were never the same again. You didn’t let on to your parents that you knew the truth. It was easy for them to hide it, maybe they decided once they saw your timer to not have more children because of it. You knew it must’ve been hard for them to keep this secret from you but also from those closest to them. They must’ve suffered a lot. People talk, people gossip. It was unheard of that a timer that didn’t work or having a timer that was already set at zero. You wondered if your parents questioned it, questioned the doctors, questioned life, questioned _you_. Part of you wanted to know the answer to those questions but the other part was too afraid to even ask. Because what if deep down they secretly hated you for it. But they never made you feel any less, maybe that’s because they never understood it, maybe they too hoped one day the timer would start working one day. But you knew, the moment you grew older you knew it would never change. The only problem was you never knew why.

Not until you met them. 

\--

Becoming a teenager was the toughest part of soulmate timer. Even though people had their timers they still experimented with relationships with their friends, or strangers that got their interest. And so did you, even though you knew it didn’t feel right. You thought maybe if you experimented that one day your timer would start again, or you find someone who also had a broken timer and together they would countdown until the moment you properly fell in love with one another. But partners came and went. And everything for you stayed the same. No matter how much you wanted to change it. It was _always_ the same. And so you thought that the reason it never felt right was because none of these people were your soulmate. Maybe that’s how it felt for everyone when they were in a relationship with someone that wasn’t their soulmate but you didn’t know the answer to that question because you were always too afraid to ask. 

\--

You wouldn’t meet them until after you turned eighteen. Eighteen lonely years of thinking your timer was broken, hating your timer and that it never worked. Hating _yourself_. Because the timer never did anything wrong, it was doing its job right? And if it was set at 00:00:00 since birth there had to be a reason… 

right?

People distanced from you like you were a disease. As time passed more and more accounts of what people called “flatliners” started becoming known, and it was like people _looked_ for 00:00:00 on the back of your wrist so they could avoid you like the plague. Part of you wanted to scream, to yell, just put it out there that you were a flatliner. You distanced yourself from your parents so that they wouldn’t be associated with “one of you”. You found the name ironic at first, there wasn’t a flat line anywhere in the number zero, you guessed that they just thought that broken timers were the equivalent of being dead. Like not having a soulmate was the end of the world. In your eyes it both was and it wasn’t. Your head said one thing and your heart said another. So you begin to wonder how they’d figure who are flatliners from the people’s timers who hit 00:00:00 when they actually meet their soulmate. Well turns out that other than the fact that most soulmates are inseparable but after a while their timers begin to fade and eventually disappear.. But yours remains. People could accept timers that started again or multiple timers but no one could accept that fact that maybe some timers didn’t work at all.

\--

One day you stumble upon a post and it says **FLATLINERS: WHAT THAT REALLY MEANS.** Of course it peaks your interest, so you skim through it. There was a lot of text but something stood out to you. One word…

**aromantic.**

Never in your life had you ever heard of this word before, similar words yes. This one though it was alien to you but thankfully the post explained it to you beautifully. The post said **“we believe what you seem to be calling flatliners, people with their timers set at 00:00:00 from birth, to be aromantic. An aromantic person is when a person experiences little to no romantic attraction,”** the post then talked about how some people’s timers may not have worked at first but once they met someone and grew closer to them it started to work (they called this being demiromantic). They explained that aromanticism was a whole spectrum of various identities, and each one the timer worked slightly differently to “the normal” way a timer would work. Not many people had seen this post but _you_ had seen it and that’s all that mattered. You realised there was a whole community out there of people just like you. That you weren’t a freak, you weren’t broken, that there was a reason for your timer not to be working. It was because there wasn’t a specific person out there for you, and that meant everything. One day you would know someone or many people who were the exact same as you in person and it would make everything so much easier. 

You began to understand why it never worked with all the people you experimented with. For the first time in a very long time the weight just lifted off the top of your shoulders and you felt free, like you could breathe again. Nothing technically had changed, deep down you always had known but you never knew that it was something other people experienced and that it **was normal** to be like this. That it’s **normal to be aromantic and that it’s okay.**

**Author's Note:**

> to be honest I didn't think I would end up writing another one of these, I just kind of got the motivation suddenly the other day and I remembered how much I love writing them. Part of me does realise that there's a lot of similarities between each one especially the endings but the most important part of them, for me, is obviously the self acceptance but exploring how it would work for us. 
> 
> This AU especially was interesting on it's own and I got to think about not only what it would look like as an aromantic person but also think about how differently the timer would work with the aro spectrum.
> 
> I have a few more that I really want to do so I'll see how it goes, if there are any soulmate AUs that you know about and would like to see it be more aro friendly feel free to recommend it for me to try!! (or if you want you can do it yourself I'd love to read it if you do)
> 
> stay safe everyone!!


End file.
